Enzyme-Responsive Materials: Properties, Design, and Applications
Satar Yousefiasl, Iman Zare, Mahsa Ghovvati, Matineh Ghomi
Abstract
Currently, various methods have been used to deliver anticancer drugs that have shown incomplete performance for their therapeutic potential. The biodistribution of drugs in the body is recognized as a fundamental challenge that reduces targeted and accurate cargo delivery to the pathological situation and blocks disease progression. Direct drug delivery to cancer tissue/cells can be a strategy to solve this problem due to the appropriate dose rate and with high efficiency and much fewer side effects than common methods, as well as increased stability of the drug in the physiological condition. Upregulation or downregulation can modulate the expression of heterogeneous enzymes such as proteases, glycosidases, and lipases to become pathologies of cancer, neurodegeneration, and inflammation. Therefore, enzymes appear as a heterogeneous stimulus in targeted drug and gene delivery systems due to the mild catalyze reaction conditions, spatiotemporal, and lack of harm. Enzyme-responsive platforms rely on enzymatic degradation of bond cleavage of oligopeptide substrate, the extracellular matrix, and stable functional groups into biomaterials. This chapter describes the types of enzyme-responsive biomaterials, their mechanism of action, and their various biomedical applications.